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The 2019 UC NCP IPC Lake Arrowhead is fast approaching (Conference Description available here). We will be meeting on May 3-5, 2019, at the UCLA Conference Center at Lake Arrowhead, CA.

We are expecting a very nice attendance, with both clinicians and scholars eager to discuss important psychoanalytic or psychoanalytically germane texts with one another. It promises to be an exceptionally stimulating weekend. Facilitators from many different fields will be leading discussions that everyone will be encouraged to participate in.

Since the date is drawing near, for logistical and financial purposes we need all attendees to fill out the Registration Forms NOW. We need to have an accurate account of those registered in order to finalize plans with the Conference Center. We also need an accurate tally of attendees before we can determine the number of students and Clinical Associates we will be able to invite as well.

Grotjahn’s 1948 description of the Los Angeles psychoanalytic scene could well describe the atmosphere of our annual University of California / New Center for Psychoanalysis Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium (UC/NCP IPC) Meeting at Lake Arrowhead:

Life goes on in Los Angeles according to the unusual pattern which is usual in this city where Nature is so kind to grapefruit and oranges. One special feature was observed by the psychoanalysts of Los Angeles with delight. Like certain churches that have camp grounds and meeting places all over the country to meet and enjoy nature, so this year Los Angeles developed into an unofficial meeting ground for visiting analysts. [Dr. David Levy spoke on “Phases of the Hostile Act.” Dr. Franz Alexander gave a talk on “The Analysis of Therapeutic Factors” and Dr. Karl A. Menninger discussed the difficulties of being a training analyst today as contrasted to formerly].

Not quite everybody came, but those who did were in a vacation mood, a very rare condition for an analyst to be caught in. Some of the most productive analytic thinking was started in the Viennese coffee-house…

This new kind of vacation meeting seems to us here to be very promising. It is a kind of cross between the coffee-house and ‘The Institute.’ The vacation episode gave us a reassuring feeling, that being west of the West as we are, we were nevertheless able to have contact with the East.

—Dr. Martin Grotjahn, reporting on activities taking place in Los Angeles, 1948 (Bulletin of the American Psychoanalytic Association).

If you want to experience an “analytic vacation” in Los Angeles—truly an experience between coffee-house and psychoanalytic institute—consider attending the UC/NCP IPC meeting this year!

If you know graduate students or clinical associates who might be interested in attending, please let them know that a number of Student Conference Scholarships are available (which waives all fees for conference attendance, and may include a small travel stipend).

Please help us get the word out. Feel free to let people know about the conference. Please direct them to the UCNCPIPC website (www.ucpsychoanalysis.com).

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We are gearing up for our Annual University of California / New Center for Psychoanalysis Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium meetings. They will be held on May 3-5, 2019 at the UCLA Conference Center in Lake Arrowhead, CA.

This year’s theme is:

Process Notes: Thinking With and Working Through Influential Psychoanalytic Texts

The full conference description is available here, and the call for session proposals will be available in the coming days. Please consider submitting a proposal to the Program Committee to facilitate one of the sessions

Also, circulate this announcement widely, identifying anyone who you think might be interested in attending and participating in the Consortium. I think the theme will establish a framework for discussion over the week-end that will be refreshing and restorative for everyone!

We will be posting the registration form for the conference this week, along with information on student stipends and paper prizes. Please be sure to check It is very important for people to register as early as possible for the weekend! We rely on the registration money to help fund the conference, including the many early up-front costs. UC/NCP IPC, alas, has no reserve funds and depends on you.

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Professor Emerita Ursula Mahlendorf (Germanic & Slavic Studies, UC Santa Barbara). Ursula was an active member of UCNCPIPC, and participated in many of our annual meetings. She was also an active supporter of New Beginnings Counseling Center in Santa Barbara.

In 2009, Ursula wrote “The Shame of Survival: Working Through a Nazi Childhood,” a powerful and moving memoir of growing up in Germany as the daughter of active Nazis. In her review of the book, Anna Kuhn writes:

“Rare are the accounts of what growing up in Nazi Germany was like for people who were reared to think of Adolf Hitler as the savior of his country, and rarer still are accounts written from a female perspective… The Shame of Survival is a compelling memoir of a girl’s experiences growing up in Nazi Germany that analyzes the lifelong implications of Nazi indoctrination on a sensitive, thoughtful young woman. It shows how a reluctant, shy, frightened, and naïve BDM member becomes swept up in Nazi ideology and documents the lifelong psychic ramifications of living with that legacy: feelings of guilt and shame, a need to work through these experiences and to take responsibility for and mourn the past. Focusing on both class and gender, Mahlendorf’s memoir offers a unique and valuable perspective on a growing body of emergent belated narratives on Nazi Germany by German émigré academics.”

A memorial service is being held on Friday, November 9th (3pm, 1505 Portesuello Ave, Santa Barbara). For information on flowers or memorial gifts, please contact her niece, Annette Mahlendorf (annette@mahlendorf.de).

New Center for Psychoanalysis (NCP) has issued a strong statement opposing separation of children from parents at the United States border, authored by James Fisher and Van DeGolia. Please read and distribute:

Just wanted to let you all know that we’ve secured the domain name UCpsychoanalysis.com, which now links directly to this site. The old address (ucpsychoanalysis.wordpress.com) still works, so no need to update anything… Also, in order to deliver a less distracting experience when browsing the site, we’ve gone “ad-free”!

Keep your eyes peeled for other upgrades and developments in the coming months, including:

The University of California – New Center for Psychoanalysis Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium (UC-NCP IPC) is pleased to announce the winners of the 2018 Hayman Graduate Fellowship. The Hayman Fellowship aids psychoanalytically informed research on the literary, cultural and humanistic expressions of genocide, racism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, interethnic violence, and the Holocaust. Our Endowment supports studies in the psychodynamics of personal, group, and international crisis management, de-escalation, conflict resolution, and peace processes. The fellowships are intended to provide for dissertation research in scholarly resources, archives, libraries, academic contacts, and to provide support for the final writing for publication of a project whose major research has been completed.

Each of the three winners was awarded $5,000 in support of the final stages of dissertation writing:

Farzad Amoozegar-Fassie (Anthropology, UCLA)—“Fleeing an Ongoing Civil War and the Plea for a Safe Haven: Being a Syrian Refugee Child in America”

This dissertation explores the experienes of trauma among Syrian refugee children in New Jersey from an inner and inter-subjective perspective within the present political climate of xenophobia.

This project studies the anxieties and uncertainties that governed relationships between secular British strategies of governance and the Sikh tradition by examining the how peoples globally contested the meaning of sovereignty through the deposed Maharaja Duleep Singh of Punjab at the end of the 19th Century” (creative/Post-Colonial studies with Psychoanalytic infusion).

This work proposes to “reckon with America’s historical unconscious and its constitutive role in the formation of the individual psyche. Her dissertation will reframes the mid-century poetics preoccupation with “racialized crisis of being” by investigating the 1950-70 period in which profound anxiety and tensions around whiteness surfaced among canonical avant-garde and activist poets—Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Amiri Baraka, Jack Spicer, John Sinclair and Jane Stembridge—(all engaged in different ways in the antiracist organizing of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements).